Sara B. Franklin is a writer, historian, teacher, and mom. Her previous work includes editing Edna Lewis: At the Table With an American Original and The Phoenicia Diner Cookbook. She earned her PhD in food studies from New York University. In a recent interview, she shared what led to her writing the book—The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America—about the legendary editor, Judith Jones.
A graduate of Bennington College, Jones began working as an editor for Doubleday (now Knopf Doubleday Publishing) in 1949 when few women could get jobs there. She found a manuscript in the slush pile and fiercely pushed her bosses to publish what is now known as Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, which to date has sold over 30 million copies and been translated in 70 languages. During her more than 50 years at Knopf, she worked with some of the most famous and prolific authors of the 20th Century, including John Updike, M.F.K. Fisher, Langston Hughes, Anne Tyler, James Beard, and notably, a young cook named Julia Childs. In addition to editing others, the hard-working Jones also co-wrote three cookbooks with her writer husband, Evan Jones, and three more separately, plus her memoir and numerous magazine articles.
How did we not hear about legacy editor Judith Jones until now?
Well, part of it is timing. She died in 2017. More to the point, because she was an editor and worked behind the scenes for her entire career, she maintained that station, positioning herself as someone in the service of others rather than herself throughout her long and storied career. Also, because she was a woman, the acts of sexism and misogyny in the industry kept her reputation fairly muted and quiet.
You met Judith and got to know her. What was your impression of her?
The first time we met, I was quite literally shaking in my boots. She was something of a personal hero to me based on the reading of that memoir. As I began to learn more and research for that meeting, the tremendous impact she had on the publishing industry at large, I was just terribly intimidated by her.
I was quite nervous, and more than 60 years her junior, but I showed up at her apartment. Her little dog came running out the door, immediately jumped up, and held the sleeve of my sweater. I was flummoxed, and she burst into laughter, and I was disarmed immediately. As soon as you got to know her even a little bit, she was warm, curious, and mischievous. She was deeply interested in people's lived experiences of the world. She had a kind of bottomless curiosity and appetite for the world. That was my experience with her for the four months we worked together. She insisted we always cook before we sat down and turned the tape recorder on.
It was an intimate and remarkable experience to spend that time with her in her home kitchen. After we stopped working together, we remained friends. She invited me to lunch once after the interviews were completed, and that was all I needed to open the door to an enduring friendship that was not based on professional contact. We'd have lunch together every few weeks, walk her dog, and I'd help her run errands. She would ask me again and again to try to help her figure out that "blasted" email, but she never got the hang of it.
Editorial and publishing was different in the mid-twentieth Century. Can you describe the lengthy, almost leisurely way people worked, how they chose and edited as compared to today?
I have to thank Betty Packer, Judith's colleague at Doubleday in 1948; they shared an office. Betty told me these stories of the pace of things. They would show up at Doubleday offices in the Rockefeller Center at about nine o'clock, put their purses and coats down, immediately go downstairs to one of the restaurants for breakfast, back upstairs again, do a little bit of work, a bit of reading and take a break for a long lunch. Everybody went out for lunch. Sometimes during the day, Judith and her colleagues would be asked to accompany the more senior editorial staff on lunches with agents who were just beginning to come into their importance as middle folk in the publishing world. Then, they'd go back into their offices for a couple of hours in the afternoon. They would regularly break at about five o'clock.
The notion of how publishing worked before the advent of the fax machine, and later email, was that things could move more slowly because, in print, they had manuscripts coming in by post. Sometimes, things were coming from across the ocean.
How difficult was it working in publishing for women, and how hard would it have been for Black women to crack the field?
Well, let me start with your second question. The truth is I don't have much data to pull from because there weren't women of color in publishing in those days. Very few women were outside the secretarial pool, but women of color did not begin to arrive on the scene until the 1970s. That's not to say there were none.
What I do know from extensive interviews that Toni Morrison gave when she was hired as an editor at Random House was that there was no one else like her. And that part of what fueled her hunger, her desire to, in her words, 'create something that functioned as her own imprint' because she recognized that there was no one representing writers of color and editing them from the perspective of a person of color in America. Her first biography, which focuses on her editorial career, is due next year. I can't wait for that. It's long overdue.
The best anecdotal information that I have comes from Judith and, again, from Betty Packer. Betty took it upon herself to be a boundary breaker as an editor who rose in the ranks and as someone who explicitly focused her attention on feminist literature. Judith took a different tack: "Keep my head down and do my boss's bidding until I've earned enough trust in the publishing house that I'm given a longer leash and more leeway to work with whom and how I want."
She edited some of the most noted writers of her era: Sylvia Plath, Judith Child, Langston Hughes, and John Updike—all very strong personalities. Did she talk about how she worked with them?
She did a little bit. She was very, very protective of her relationship with her authors. Every time I would press she would sort of resist. I think she treated them the same way I would say that she treated marriage, which was, it's a long game.
In order to allow a writer to bloom, to trust her as an editor, and to come into their own their best self, she needed to give them room to work how they wrote best, which for someone like Anne Tyler meant Judith waited very patiently and would drop encouraging notes in the mail just to let Anne know that she was thinking of her, eagerly awaiting a new manuscript but was quite hands off.
John Updike turned in manuscripts that were quite complete but wanted the back-and-forth dialogue with Judith when it came to every other aspect of the publication of his books. He wanted a sounding board and, over time, realized how much he could trust Judith to the point where he appointed her executor of his literary state.
Judith championed the Anne Frank manuscript, got her writing published (despite publishing heads), and she's very well known for that. But why was it so difficult?
Before Judith got the manuscripts, the book had already been published in two countries. It was about to come out in France. Judith read the galley in French.
It was being published, and it was selling not phenomenally but well enough.
In the United States, it was a bit of a different story in part because of the politics around Judaism, the Holocaust. In 1950, when Judith encountered those manuscripts, we're still talking about a time in which a huge number of people all across the globe were still Holocaust deniers.
I think it's important to contextualize the past that Judith's boss made of that manuscript in multiple ways. There are multiple different sorts of cultural contexts, and I think one of them gets overlooked. But also Anne Frank's age at the time of writing that diary. It was self-edited. She was so young that I think, in a way, many editors looked at that manuscript as sort of scribblings of a child that could not possibly be taken seriously by the literary establishment or that wouldn't be taken seriously by a reading public that was largely adults, that she would be too immature in her writing. And, of course, history has proved that entirely untrue.
Judith worked with many cookbook authors, from Child's to Oprah's one-time cook, Rosie Daley. Was she a foodie?
I don't like that word, and she didn't particularly like it either. She associated that word with a kind of stir mentality. She had a real aversion, almost to the point of an allergy. But the food world, as she thought, is catty and competitive. And that was not her approach to working with food or her interest in working with cookbooks. She was interested in talented home cooks with big personalities who could put together a singular book that would teach people and inform them about various elements of cultures, whether those were cultures from here within the United States or from places farther afield.
You spent some time with her in her house. Did you get a chance to visit any of the places she lived in during her lean years, including Paris, America, Maine, or somewhere else?
New Hampshire. I've driven through the town in New Hampshire where she lived. I did not go to Paris, partly because I sold this book in the spring of 2019. And we all know what happened a year later. In 2020, I had three-year-old twins at home at the time, and it became quickly apparent that that was off limits. I had also been there before, so that was helpful, but I also had a huge cache of photographs, all these incredible letters that Judith sent home to her parents, and later, she had a good sense to keep.
She chronicles her daily lived experience. Things like her date books from the years she lived in Paris, so I knew where she was on many days, down to the days she washed her hair and did her laundry. Days that she went to get a dress fitted that she went to have coffee with so and so or cocktails and what they ate.
As a writer, teacher, and oral historian, which one do you most enjoy doing?
I love what they do when they overlap. I love doing interviews, long-form oral history interviews, and more than the other two. I love writing based on those interviews, which, of course, this book was, so it was a total joy to work on. I'm much happier working on interviews than I am working on historical archives. I find it more interesting because it's much more complex and less clear.
Historical information is not as fixed as I think sometimes the print archives suggest. But my God, I love teaching and hope never to stop doing it. I really, really love it. I'm so glad we're physically back in the classroom after a couple of years of not. It helps keep me humble. It helps keep me curious. It helps remind me of all the things I don't know. As someone who spends a great deal of my time otherwise—when I'm working by myself—I relish that time in the classroom with young people talking through ideas and sort of troubling over stuff together. I love it. Each feeds into the other.
Where are you teaching?
I teach at New York University.
Do you have anything that you are currently working on?
I am not. I have an idea for another nonfiction book, and I've been taking notes for about two years now very slowly. But I think it is something here's what I feel comfortable saying. It is a book that is decidedly rooted in place, and that is much more overtly political.
